Circa1865

Though corrupted by the new Northern regime and the “New South” of industrial progress to match the North, Southern Democrats until the mid-1930s were a conservative element in Congress.  The increasingly socialist bent of FDR pushed many Southern Democrats into the Dixiecrat party of the late 1940s.   The reader is encouraged to read the official platforms of the 1936 CPUSA and today’s Democrat party — and note the minor differences.

Bernhard Thuersam, Circa1865

Advancing the Collectivist Revolution:

“Although the Communists repeat the familiar Marxian indictment of modern society, they give greater emphasis to another criticism. The essential fault in capitalism, they say, is neither the inequality in distribution nor the inadequacy of production of the necessities of life. The fatal evil is the inequality of power, and the goal to be striven for is an equality not of wealth but of social status and cultural opportunity.

The achievement of that goal involves the destruction of a political as well as of an economic system. For the state, in any of its typical contemporary forms, is inextricably associated with the capitalist order. It historical role has been to serve the interests of those who own property, to support them in their domination of the property-less, and to suppress all attempts to shake off that domination. Thus the modern state is an agency for the maintenance of the status quo.

However democratic the structure of government, the real repositories of political authority are the owners of wealth, who, by their possession of the main organs of propaganda and education – the schools and colleges, the churches, and the press – control the political and social opinions of the workers.

How, according to the Communists, is the modern political and economic system to be ended? Its dissolution, they say, in the orthodox fashion, will come about partly through its own development and degeneration. Marx explained this to mean that capitalism must prepare the way for socialism, both destructively, by creating those conditions of concentration, overproduction, unemployment and poverty that make the workers in every way ready for a socialist revolution; and constructively, by developing the instrumentalities of large-scale production to a point where the proletarians can use them for socialist purposes.

The conditions prerequisite for the success of a revolution in a particular country are, according to Lenin, as follows: first, there must be an organized group of aggressive and resolute revolutionists, clearly conscious of their objective; and secondly, although the group will inevitably be small in numbers, it must be supported by an active discontent among the people generally; finally, the revolution must be undertaken when the defenders of the old order are weak and divided.”

(Recent Political Thought, Francis W. Coker, D. Appleton-Century Company, 1934, pp. 162-164)